A Short Tour

The Marina at rest

General

The Marina is one of three ships of this type in the Oceania fleet. It is very well appointed and comfortable with quite a few luxury touches. Although a very nice ship, it just did not seem to have the personality or friendly feeling as the Windstar yachts we have cruised on.

Statistics

The Marina is considered a mid-size ship at 785 feet long. The passenger capacity is 1250 people and we had a completely full ship on our cruise. This very full ship did cause some crowding problems, especially in the restaurants when poor weather made the outside dining areas unusable.

Our cabin

Our cabin was what was termed a “Concierge Veranda Cabin” on deck 9, about 6 or 7 cabins from stern of the ship.

Our cabin on the Marina

This cabin size and layout is probably about the most common on Marina and we did have a few extra features available because of the “Concierge” class, although we did not make much use of them. The location was reasonable, although we did have to go up or down at least three decks to get to any of the public areas of the ship. It was quiet, with no noticeable noise from adjoining cabins or the hallway outside our door. A couple of times there was what sounded like someone throwing or dropping furniture or other heavy items seemingly next door, but was probably in some service area of the ship. Thankfully, this did not happen at night.

The bathroom was reasonable size with a single sink and both a full sized tub and a rather small shower. It was still definitely a one person at a time bathroom. Cabins in some areas of the ship had been converted to a larger shower, no tub, and a bit more space. The cabin and bathroom reinforced my opinion from our cruise on the Oceania Sirena that any future Oceania cruise should be in one of their “Penthouse Suite” cabins for the additional space.

There was a reasonable amount of electrical outlets, both 110V (US type), 220V (European), and USB recharging outlets. I had brought a couple of converter plugs which we did make use of. The only outlet suitable for the 110V hair dryer was at the desk close to the door to the veranda. Every time I had to dry my hair, I had a few unkind words for the person who mounted the only available, somewhat small, mirror so low on the wall that I had to stoop way over to see what I was doing.

The veranda was a usable size, with two chairs and a small table. Between the mostly poor/cool weather and our schedules, we really never made use of the furniture. Our only use of the veranda at all was for a few photos and to stick our heads out to check the weather and temperature.

We did have friends in one of the Vista suites and they invited us to join them a couple of times. (Although we would have liked to reciprocate, trying to host more people in our cabin just made no sense at all.) These Vista suites are certainly beautiful and roomy with over 1200 sq. ft (our cabin had 277 sq ft) and a very roomy veranda. Features included a guest bath, completely separate bedroom, an exercise room, and extras such as more visits to the specialty restaurants, a butler, and champagne.

Food/Dining

The Marina has plenty of dining opportunities. In addition to the main restaurant (The Grand Dining Room or GDR), there is a buffet restaurant (The Terrace Café) that is the primary restaurant for breakfast and lunch and is is also open for dinner, the Waves Grill, an open-air casual restaurant on the pool deck, four specialty restaurants, two very special restaurants, and a coffee bar.

The Grand Dining Room is ready for the dinner crowd.

The GDR (Grand Dining Room) is also open for breakfast and lunch most days, but has somewhat limited hours: If you have a morning excursion, the GDR probably will not work. Waves Grill is handy for late lunches, like returning from a long excursion after 2:00 PM when the Terrace Café closes, but is not comfortable on very cold or rainy days. The Terrace Café also has outside seating, but it is rather exposed and is closed in rough or cold/wet weather. In bad weather, Waves is not very comfortable and the Terrace Café exterior seating is unusable, making the remaining interior spaces very limited and empty tables hard to find during busy times.

Specialty Restaurants

The four specialty restaurants do not cost anything additional, but reservations are required. Everyone has a “quota” for how many times they can visit a specialty restaurant on a cruise and good reservations times can be difficult to get. We had four reservations to use, one at each of the specialty restaurants.

Polo Grill A traditional steakhouse, with menu and furnishings to match

Toscana Italian cuisine with a Tuscany flair

Jacques French dining, but perhaps a little lighter on the French emphasis

Red Ginger A very definite Asian flair, but not too far out

We managed to get to all four of the specialty restaurants and I’ll be discussing our visits in the main part of my report.

Other dining venues

Aquamar This is a small restaurant just outside the Terrace Café and the focus is healthy eating. Fruits, veggies, whole wheat, with offerings like banana pancakes (in which I did not detect any bananas), avocado toasts, energy bowls, and yellowfin tacos. The only time I would see many people in Aquamar is when the Terrace Café was overcrowded.

Baristas As the name suggests, this is a coffee bar with made to order specialty drinks. We found that ordering an Americno coffee with two shots of espresso (instead of the normal one) produced just the kind of coffee we like. They also have a selection of cookies, small cupcakes, and other munchies.

Looking past the Internet Café toward Barista’s

La Reserve A small but rather special dining room and experience: La Reserve must be scheduled/reserved, usually well in advance, and accommodates only one group per evening. With a maximum setting of 12 people, there is a significant cost, as you might expect with multi-course dinner choices like “the DOM PÉRIGNON EXPERIENCE”. This is the only dining facility that we did not try.

Lounges & Entertainment

As on many ships, there is a large lounge area toward the front of the ship on an upper (14^th) deck called the Horizon Lounge. There was full bar service (although it sometimes had some problems) and entertainment at several times in the evening. Typically, there would be some form of music, like one of the ship’s bands or the string quartet, prior to dinner, and then the ship’s “Rock the Boat” dance band would entertain after the primary entertainment for the evening was over. We spent quite a few late nights here with our friends

The Main Lounge or theater (Deck 5, forward) is where the primary evening entertainment took place. I’ll describe the actual entertainment more fully in the daily log part of this report. The main lounge was also used for organizing the daily excursions, the daily trivia contest, and other such group events.

Martinis Bar is a popular bar (midship, deck 6) with comfortable seating, a piano (complete with a “Piano Man”), and good drinks. It was a popular place for some of us to gather before and/or after dinner for drinks.

The Marina String Quartet played at various times at different places around the ship and occasionally joined in with one of the other bands.

The “Rock the Boat” four-person band (vocalist and three musicians) provided “dance music” when needed. They sometimes performed around the pool in the afternoon and had the late-night gig in the Horizon Lounge, typically starting at 10:15.

The Marina Show Band provided music for the primary evening shows, backing up the vocalists and the ship’s production company.

The Marina Production Company consisted of, I believe, four dancers and three vocalists who were also pretty good dancers. They put on pretty good shows, considering the limitations of the stage and other facilities. I would put the show quality just a small notch below the better Las Vegas level shows.

There were a couple of guest entertainers for some of the evening primary entertainment and I’ll cover those in the daily log section of this report.

Excursions

Susan and I had signed up for five off-ship excursions through Oceania plus one independent tour and another tour arranged by our friend Jyoti. I will, of course, describe each of these in the day-by-day sections of this report. In general, the excursions arranged by Oceania will be more expensive than their independent equivalent, will probably be in fairly large groups (typically 20 – 30), on large busses. They will, however, be completely free of worry and of at least reasonable quality.

Other

Like all ships, Marina has an exercise room. Susan tried it out twice but was not enthused, and I was having some illness issues and did not even give it a try. There is a walking/jogging track on an upper deck: 10 laps to the mile but most people just walked laps on the upper deck overlooking the pool area.

The pool was almost big enough to actually use and there were two spas/hot-tubs.

Like other non-Windstar cruises, we essentially never saw the Captain or any other senior officers around the ship. It appears that, the larger the ship, the more remote and unavailable the officers are.

End of Chapter 0: The Oceania Marina

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